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Bruce Banner (Earth-21399)
Bruce Banner was a physicist, biologist and inventor, searching for a way to tap into the hidden strengths that all humans have. But during his work, an accidental overdose of gamma radiation altered his body chemistry, and now, when Bruce Banner grows angry or outraged... a startling metamorphosis occurs. His creature, the Hulk, is driven by rage and pursued by an investigative reporter as well as the United States military for murders he never committed. Bruce Banner is believed to be dead, and he must let the world think that he is ''dead, until he can find a way to control the raging spirit that dwells within him... History Early Life Bruce Banner was born in Dayton, Ohio, to power plant technician Brian Banner and his wife, Rebekah Walters. Bruce's childhood was nowhere close to what could be considered healthy; though Rebekah loved him as a mother should, Brian was an irascible drunkard who constantly abused his wife and child – often verbally and emotionally, sometimes physically. This was for one main reason: Brian was of the delusional belief that exposure to toxic chemicals at work had caused him to pass defective genes to his son – the fact that Bruce was actually possessed of a gifted intellect only seemed to confirm Brian's fears and reinforce his hatred of the boy. Furthermore, he was envious of Bruce for being the focus of Rebekah's attention and affections. One day, after a particularly vitriolic outburst by Brian, Bruce's mother decided she had had enough; she told her husband that she was leaving him and taking the then-15-year-old Bruce with her. Brian was so furious that he attacked them both - this time with deadly intent. Bruce tried to fight back and protect his mother, but was ultimately overpowered and tossed aside, being forced to watch as Brian repeatedly bashed Rebekah's head against the coffee table, killing her. Bruce escaped his father's murderous wrath by locking himself in his room, then jumping out the window and hiding inside his neighbor's house. The neighbors promptly called the police and Brian was arrested. As he was being dragged away, Brian swore revenge against his son, calling him a weakling and vermin. Bruce was later placed in the custody of his aunt Susanne in New Mexico, where he spent the rest of his high school years. Even after undergoing therapy, Bruce never truly recovered from his psychological trauma; to avoid ever having to become as violent as his father, he kept his negative emotions locked away in the subconscious part of his mind and avoided confrontation. Education and Science Career Bruce went on to graduate from high school as valedictorian, and then attended the University of New Mexico in pursuit of degrees in biochemistry and physics. During the later years of his education, he met fellow student Elizabeth "Betty" Ross, an army brat studying microbiology. The two quickly befriended each other and often worked together on projects, though Bruce kept his romantic affections for her unspoken. Eventually, however, Betty started dating Glenn Talbot, an officer in the Army whose boorish attitudes reminded Bruce too much of his father. Bruce's thesis was on hysterical strength, a phenomenon in which ordinary people demonstrated seemingly superhuman strength when under pressure, commonly when a loved one is in danger. This was of personal importance to Bruce because he was still haunted by his inability to save his mother and the biting words his father spoke as he was dragged away, which left him always feeling weak. After months of research, however, the only links Bruce could find between the subjects of his study was a high adenine/thymine content in their DNA. This puzzled him, considering his own DNA tests showed higher adenine/thymine content than any of the other subjects. Becoming the Hulk At some point during the study period, Bruce was having lunch by himself in the university's library when he came across a history book detailing the life story of World War II hero Steven Rogers, better known as Captain America. Inspired by Rogers's story, Bruce theorized that what had been holding him back from accessing his potential strength was the fact that his adenine/thymine genes were recessive, and that he could unlock such dormant genes by using a similar enhancement process. Unfortunately, he didn't have the proper materials to work out his hypothesis, so he resorted to infiltrating the biology labs after hours and using the equipment there to continue his research, intent on replicating the Super Soldier enhancement process. Working in secret over a period of two months, Bruce engineered a retrovirus to transmit the desired genes throughout his body. Then one night, impatient to test the theory, he infiltrated the radiology labs and subjected himself to a dosage of gamma radiation to activate the gene therapy. Unbeknownst to him at the time, the lab equipment had been upgraded and gave Banner a much greater dose of radiation than he had anticipated - even so, the experiment seemed to be a failure at first, since Banner never felt any stronger or weaker than he had before. Tired and dejected, Bruce left the lab, forgetting to retrieve his notes. The next day, Betty and her classmates discovered Banner's secret notes in the radiology lab. They confronted him about it during closing time, during which Glenn Talbot appeared and antagonized Bruce further, threatening to bring the weight of the whole US Army down on the "rogue" scientist. In the course of their altercation, Talbot accidentally knocked over a shelf full of dangerous chemicals, causing a huge explosion that started a fire and in which Bruce was seriously injured. The shock of the injury compounded by the anger he felt towards Talbot finally activated the virus inside Bruce's body, and he transformed into the monstrous, green-skinned Hulk for the first time. The creature, a manifestation of Bruce's repressed emotions, both good and bad, came into the world confused and afraid. Talbot, terrified by Bruce's transformation, fled into the night. Meanwhile, the Hulk wandered the university, which was now engulfed in flames, until he found Betty unconscious beneath a pile of rubble. Using his superhuman strength, the Hulk cleared the debris off of her body and carried her out of the building, left her at the home of Bruce's psychologist, Leonard Samson, and then disappeared into the night. On the Run Bruce woke up the next morning atop Atalaya Mountain, draped only in torn jeans and with little recollection of the night before. After stealing clothes from someone's backyard and renting a room at a local motel, Banner picked up a local newspaper at a coffee shop and read the front page in horror: "Albuquerque University in ruins; "Incredible Hulk" kills two". The story was written by Rick Jones, an investigative reporter who happened to have been covering the university's research projects and had witnessed the Hulk leaving the burning campus with Betty Ross in his arms. Jones surmised that not only was the Hulk responsible for destroying the university, but that he had in fact killed Bruce Banner. As a consequence of all of this, Bruce decided to go into hiding until he could find a way to cure or control the problems caused by his "Gamma Virus". After visiting an unconscious Betty Ross in the hospital to say goodbye, he picked up a taxi to the outskirts of town and then began hitchiking west. He eventually stopped at Las Vegas, where he realized he didn't have the money to research his condition. Bruce therefore resolved to lay low for a few weeks, working odd jobs around town until he could get the supplies he needed. The Vegas Fiasco Bruce managed to find a relatively well-paying job at a local Vegas casino as a slot attendant under the alias William Bixby, although he began to suspect that something shady was going on with the casino's management because of the way they walked about the casino and talked with each other. His fears mounted after he learned that a coworker whom he befriended had been found dead in her home, having seemingly hung herself. Unlike most of the officers, who ruled that her death was a suicide, Bruce suspected foul play and infiltrated her house to investigate. He ended up finding evidence that his coworker had been blackmailed by the casino management because she had discovered that the management was embezzling money from the casino to a local mob boss; when she defied the managers, thugs were sent to make an example of her. His suspicions confirmed, Bruce resolved to avenge her murder and see justice done - after returning to work the following day, he left his post to recover the evidence, then sent an anonymous tip to police. The thought that this would make him a target for the mob occurred to Bruce too late. Once he finally realized this, he quickly packed his bags and tried to skip town again; unfortunately, he stopped briefly at a Chevron gas station on the outskirts of town in the middle of the night to resupply when he was cornered by the mob's top enforcer: Joe Fixit. Bruce, knowing exactly why they came here, panicked and tried to escape, only to be caught in the end. A group of thugs pinned the defenseless Bruce against a wall as Joe brutally beat the scientist, before they released their grip so Joe could put a bullet in his skull. But as Joe trained the gun on Bruce's head, Bruce looked up at him with electric green eyes, startling the enforcers. They stood paralyzed as Bruce transformed into the Hulk and then attacked the crew, mortally wounding Joe and causing massive damages to a nearby residential neighborhood before escaping into the night. The carnage was witnessed from afar by an off-duty police officer who later reported his sighting to the ever-inquisitive Rick Jones. The Slammer Bruce woke up on the side of the road, not knowing where he was. There wasn't much traffic on the roads, so he trekked on for what seemed like hours until he came upon a town whose sign indicated that he was now in Idaho. He didn't get the chance to settle down this time - an officer stopped him on the road and had him arrested for vagrancy. Bruce knew something was wrong when he realized the officer wasn't taking him to the station in town, but to a prison camp out in the middle of the woods. He demanded to speak to a lawyer about this, but the officer coldly shut him down and had Bruce tossed into the facility without trial. His cellmate was Carl "Crusher" Creel, a former boxer from Reno who turned to crime after his career fell apart, and the two men did not get along. Bruce's first day in prison was spent on a chain gang, performing manual labor for the local farmers. It didn't take Bruce very long to figure out that these farmers were actually members of a drug cartel trafficking opioids. In fact, the prison's warden was actually in league with the cartel and outsourcing the manual labor required on the drug farms to his prisoners. Knowing that the guards wouldn't be listening to his pleas for a lawyer anytime soon, Bruce plotted to escape, but Creel suspected that Bruce was conspiring against him and attacked him in their cell during the night. Once again, the stress of being physically assaulted induced another transformation, and the Hulk ended up leading a mass prison breakout that the guards were unable to contain. As the Hulk escaped further north, Creel went further south back to Reno, where he was eventually recaptured and placed in a proper prison facility. Crossing into Canada After escaping the prison camp, the Hulk crossed the border into Canada and wandered aimlessly through the wilderness for some time before he reverted back into Bruce Banner in a small cave on a hilltop. During that time, the Hulk was spotted from afar by a pair of deer hunters who mistook him for Sasquatch. As was quickly becoming routine for him, Bruce woke up and followed the river until he found the city of Calgary, Alberta. He took a job as a janitor at the University of Calgary under the alias Randolph Bates, where he overheard some students talking about their professor's boundary-pushing research in radiology. Bruce sensed an opportunity and resorted to his old tricks, infiltrating the professor's lab after hours to continue Bruce's own research into a cure for the Hulk. During one of his "night shifts", Bruce noticed that one of the professor's equations on the blackboard was incorrect. Without thinking, Bruce corrected the whole formula and then left the lab to sleep. His work was discovered the next morning by the professor, a man named Walter Langkowski, who hid out in the lab for his mystery helper. Eventually, Walter caught Bruce in the act and demanded an explanation; Bruce told him that he was suffering from a previously undiscovered form of radiation sickness without giving any details about the Hulk, and that he believed Walter's research would be key to helping him recover. To prove his claims, Walter performed a series of tests on Bruce which all came back positive for radioactive material. As a result, Walter offered him Bruce a position as his lab partner, to which Bruce agreed. Working together, Bruce and Walter made significant headway in understanding the exact effects of the Gamma Virus. However, their work was cut short when Walter got a call from his ex-wife Veronica, telling him to come to her hometown of Slave Lake on urgent family business. The two scientists were promptly forced to pack their bags and head off to see what was wrong. Curse of the Wendigo Bruce and Walter arrived in Slave Lake to an atmosphere of confusion and dread with a noticeably higher police presence than normal. When they visited Veronica and her son Kenneth at her house, she filled them in on the situation: Veronica's then-fiancee, Paul Cartier, had invited some friends over from Montreal to do some hunting up in the Alberta wilderness, but they haven't returned in two weeks. Worse still, the resultant search party found that the nearby farmhouse belonging to the Hudson family was empty of humans and strewn with the corpses of their livestock. Because of this, Slave Lake's residents have been anticipating a killer in their midst. Walter inquired as to why Veronica asked ''him, of all people, to come over, and she simply replied that Kenneth needed his father. Bruce accepted the Langkowskis' offer to join them to dinner, but secretly planned to skip town again - he didn't want any more trouble than he had already been through and feared the possibility that the murderer could appear and force him to go green again. During the dinner, the group heard a knock at their door, and Walter answered it to find a young man with grievous slash wounds across the whole length of his chest. Veronica recognized him as Georges Baptiste, one of Paul Cartier's friends. Bruce helped tend to the Baptiste's wounds as the Langkowskis called emergency services and the police. The group accompanied Baptiste to the hospital, hoping he could provide the town with new information on the killer. When Baptiste regained consciousness, Bruce, Walter and Veronica came into the room to hear him recount what had happened to him. Baptiste was out hunting with Cartier and one of his other friends, Henri Cluzot, when a freak blizzard hit their location. The group managed to find shelter in a small hillside cabin, but not before Cluzot tragically died of frostbite. None of the men had packed enough rations for the journey home, since they were forced to abandon their snowmobiles to the blizzard, and they began to starve. Eventually, Cartier succumbed to his hunger and decided their best chance of keeping themselves full was to cannibalize Cluzot. Baptiste was appalled by this suggestion and struck out on his own to find a way back home. That night, Baptiste recalled hearing the piercing calls of an animal he never heard before, and later being attacked by a vicious, white-furred beast. Baptiste claimed he only survived because the sun rose before the creature could land the killing blow, forcing it to flee for shelter, after which Baptiste limped back to civilization. Baptiste's doctor, a First Nations man, recognized his story as being eerily similar to the legend of the Wendigo. Most of the townsfolk found the story hard to believe - Bruce a little less so, given his own condition. But Baptiste would be proven correct later that night when police investigated a 911 call to find an entire family of civilians dead, and a huge, white-furred humanoid beast in the process of eating their corpses - this, undoubtedly, was Paul Cartier transformed into an inhuman beast. The Wendigo killed the officers on the spot and then rampaged through town, forcing the townspeople into a panic that split Bruce up from the Langkowskis. Veronica and Kenneth were eventually cornered by the Wendigo on a lonely street. As the beast pounced on the pair, Bruce Banner came in, seemingly out of nowhere, and pushed them both out of the way, causing the Wendigo to sever Bruce's arm with a single swipe of its claws. Before the beast could complete its kill, however, Bruce blocked its oncoming bite with his good arm and then transformed into the Hulk as Walter looked on in awe. The Hulk then engaged the Wendigo in battle, with both seemingly being evenly matched until the Hulk regenerated his arm and gained the upper hand. He eventually impaled the Wendigo on a piece of steel rebar and threw it through the pumps of a gas station, after which an RCMP officer shot the Wendigo and caused it to burst into flames, finally killing it. After the battle, the Hulk shared his first tender moment with the Langkowski family until the RCMP came along and started firing upon the Hulk, thinking he was going to kill the Langkowskis. The Hulk, irritated by their attack, knocked the police back with a single stomp of his foot and then fled into the woods. Glenn Talbot's Return Just as before, the Hulk wandered aimlessly through the Alberta wilderness for some time longer before reverting back into Bruce Banner. Bruce took note of the fact that going green had brought back his arm and then eventually took shelter in the same abandoned hunting cabin that Paul Cartier used when he became the Wendigo. Here Bruce stayed for three days, worrying that the Hulk finally might have hurt somebody else. On the fourth day, a group of US black ops soldiers infiltrated the cabin, sedated Bruce with tranquilizers meant for elephants, and took him away. Bruce woke up in a prison cell in an unknown location. Speaking from behind a one-way mirror was Glenn Talbot, the man who provoked Bruce's first transformation, who bluntly told Bruce that he was officially responsible for the deaths and destruction of property at Slave Lake and would be held indefinitely while the officers of rank debated Bruce's ultimate fate. Bruce was enraged, but was quickly sedated when the room was pumped full of nitrous oxide, preventing a Hulk-out. It turned out that Talbot had reported Bruce's first transformation to his superior and Betty Ross's father, US Army General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross. Ross was skeptical at first - he believed Talbot's lie that Bruce was responsible for destroying the university and putting Betty into a coma, but believed Bruce's prosecution should be a police matter and outright ridiculed Talbot's claims regarding the Hulk. However, as reports of Hulk sightings began to pop up all over the United States, Ross started to take Talbot more and more seriously. Eventually, after the battle of Slave Lake, Ross finally agreed to send troops to find and capture Bruce. However, once Bruce had been captured, Talbot had an epiphany - Bruce's experiments had been the single most successful Super Soldier project since Captain America, and now the end result was right in the Army's custody. He wished to keep Bruce around as a guinea pig for DARPA in the hopes of reverse-engineering the Gamma Virus for military use. Ross, on the other hand, was only concerned with stopping the national security threat posed by the Hulk, while simultaneously punishing Bruce for what happened to Betty. Eventually, they settled on a compromise: harvest the Gamma Virus from Bruce, and then dispose of him afterwards. Over the next few days, samples were taken of Bruce's blood and tissues and then subsequently handed over to the resident research team, under the direction of head researcher Dr. Samuel Sterns. The execution plans were complicated, however, when Bruce, tucked away in his cell, had his recurring nightmare of the night his father murdered his mother and woke up with green eyes. The cell's operators quickly turned on the gas, but this time Bruce's rage and fear overcame the gas and he went green once again. The Hulk easily broke out of his cell and then went on a rampage through the facility before eventually escaping. The army's efforts to stop him were to no avail - they gravely underestimated the Hulk's true power, given that all his previous encounters were against civilians with small arms and one "large animal". Ross and Talbot encountered the Hulk face-to-face during his escape, where both men heard something they would never forget: Meeting Logan ''To be added...Category:Heroes Category:Created by N0bodii Category:Versions of Hulk Category:Earth-21399 Category:Heroes of Earth-21399 Category:Gamma Ray Exposure